Design

For every new subway ad featuring an online pharmacy and a nice monstera plant, there was a new pop-up skate shop soaking up the runoff of Supreme teens. HSWLD on Delancey, a dozen others lost to memory… Online, I browsed IJJI and v.soon and Anti-Social Social Club on my friend’s Tiny Clothing Stores Are.na channel, this selection a mere trickle of

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Many brands that typically have large stores, including Sephora and Nordstrom, are creating smaller-format stores embedded in neighborhoods. These stores feature less inventory, since customers can order items to be delivered to their homes, and store managers curate the products available on shelves to meet the needs of the specific community.

I’ve always had this sense that if you build a container for something, you will make things to fill it. What I frequently do is try to figure out different containers. A website is a container.

“Harajuku began to draw customers away from more popular shopping districts like Shibuya and Shinjuku by appealing to the evolving youth tastes with the establishment of Laforet in 1978, which championed these modern brands. The department store was one of the first to place local designers’ clothing that couldn’t be purchased anywhere else at the ... See more

The real question is, where does scarcity still exist? It exists where it has always existed—in the distribution layer, with the limits on human attention. Artificial intelligence can generate abundance in creation, it can even create new currencies, but it cannot convert attention into currency. Only human beings can do that. 

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Research continues to show that while online shopping continues to grow across most demographics, the youngest customers, Gen Z’s remain very comfortable shopping in-store, particularly if it includes a high level of experience, both through tech and touch. Walker Sands research shows 59% of 18 to 25-year-olds prefer a “brand experience”, but it be... See more

To accomplish this goal, the “proud extroversion” of the early Web soon gave way to a much more homogenized experience: hundred-and-forty-character text boxes, uniformly sized photos accompanied by short captions, Like buttons, retweet counts, and, ultimately, a shift away from chronological time lines and profile pages and toward statistically opt... See more

The draw of big cities, like New York, London, LA, or Tokyo is that they are made of a series of distinct, colorful neighborhoods, each with their own identity, vibe, and demographic. What makes them different are the small, local, mom-and-pop shops—not the chains of identical mass retail stores.